Into Africa Page 33

  The prudent move would have been to turn east, toward the coast, and try to fall in with an Arab slave caravan heading for Zanzibar. Livingstone could have saved himself that way. The slavers would have food, and maybe even medicine, to fortify him for the six-month trek.

  But Livingstone had come to Africa to find the source of the Nile—he'd promised Murchison—and was determined not to leave until he solved mankind's last great geographical mystery. So instead of turning to the coast, Livingstone led his caravan west into the heart of Africa one last time, gambling he could pinpoint the source and then flee to Zanzibar before his time ran out. Through his travels and through ongoing interviews of local tribes, Livingstone was convinced the legendary Four Fountains of Herodotus were getting closer. Livingstone had already written the telegram he would wire to the Foreign Office. It lay in the watertight tin box holding his journals and letters. The only thing left was to fill in the blanks. “I have the pleasure of reporting to your Lordship that on the ____ I succeeded in reaching your remarkable fountains . . .”

  Such a scenario, however, was not meant to be. Murchison was already dead, though Livingstone never knew it. And January was a treacherous month for him to gamble with his life. The first month of the year normally brought as much as forty inches of rain in that subequatorial belt, but January 1873 was the worst in memory, an exhaustive continuum of cold and wet and clouds soaking feet and morale, bringing on chills and fever and misery in the healthiest of men. Even days that began with blue skies and puffy white clouds eventually blackened with storm, like a sudden act of sin consuming the clean soul of a believer.

  The water poured down ceaselessly, flooding low-lying meadows and forests until they became chains of puddles and bayous and impromptu rivers that seemed to cover all of Central Africa. The only way to distinguish flood land from river was by the deceptive current that would suddenly knock a man off his feet. Minor depressions such as elephant footprints clotted with algae and muck until they became miniature swamps unto themselves.

  Making matters worse was the lack of food. The ground was underwater, rendering foraging difficult. Game animals had run for higher ground. Livingstone's caravan numbered fifty-seven porters; his four faithful assistants Chuma, Susi, Gardner, and Amoda; Halima, Amoda's wife, who cooked for Livingstone; and Ntoeka, Chuma's wife. There were others who had joined the caravan since Tabora, most notably a teenaged boy, later distinctly remembered by African villagers but never mentioned in his journals by Livingstone. All the members of Livingstone's group, like the explorer, were starving. The porters were growing too weak to carry him or manage their bundles of cloth, beads, and gear. They tromped through mile after mile of mud and decay and water, watching all the while for crocodiles and snakes.

  But they pressed on. Throughout January, Livingstone and his men averaged just a mile and a half of travel daily. By the end of the month it was even less. Livingstone had grown too weak to walk. Chuma, with his broad shoulders and powerful legs, carried the explorer on his shoulders, even through deep swamps.

  “Rain, rain, rain, as if it never tired,” Livingstone wrote wearily in his journal on January 23. And the next day: “Went one and three-quarter hour's journey to a large stream through a drizzling rain. At least three hundred yards of deep water amongst sedges and sponges of one hundred yards. One part was neck deep for fifty yards and the water cold.”

  The rains continued into February. Like the lion outside his camp one miserable evening “that had wandered into this world of water and anthills and roared all night as if very much disgusted,” Livingstone complained about the misery, even to God, but saw no easy way out of his predicament. In the end it was a simple choice. If he went home without finding the source he would live out his days as a disgraced pauper. It was as simple as that. Livingstone pushed on for the source, even after a massive colony of driver ants—carnivorous ants that traveled in swarms hundreds of thousands strong, capable of eating even large beasts—invaded his tent one night and bit him so extensively he had welts all over his body. Chuma and Susi saved his life by setting grass fires that smoked the ants from the camp, then spent hours plucking the remainder off Livingstone's body.

  In early March, Livingstone and his men came upon an oasis of sorts, when they discovered an abandoned settlement and the remains of a garden. They gorged on long-forgotten cassava and sweet potatoes before continuing their journey. Livingstone's strength returned after that impromptu starch feast, but not for long. Even in his pain, he wrote rapturous journal entries about Africa, like the day he wrote of the beautiful wildflowers blooming all around him. Vibrant hues of pink, blue, white, and yellow burst forth “in one whorl of blossoms.” He wrote of that beauty because it reminded him that God was near, just like he described the saturated lion, and the “weird, unearthly voice” of a fish eagle. God's will had brought Livingstone to Africa in the first place, and in His presence Livingstone found strength.

  Livingstone's birthday was March 19. He celebrated in a swamp, sleeping in a hut choked with poisonous spiders. He waited for his men to purchase the canoes they would need to paddle onward. Once, when the frustrating negotiations dragged on and on with Matipa, the local chief renting the canoes, Livingstone vented his rage by sitting up in bed and firing off round after round from his pistol. He would beat death, that was for sure. Through the kindness of strangers and enemies, he had done it over and over on the source expedition. There was no reason to think he couldn't do it again if he had a little help. “Can I hope for ultimate success? So many obstacles have arisen. Let not Satan prevail over me Lord Jesus,” he prayed.

  In a letter he'd received when Stanley sent the resupply caravan back to Tabora, his oldest daughter, Agnes, who had graduated from her Paris boarding school and was living in London, had urged Livingstone to stay in Africa until he was done. “Much as I wish you to come home,” she wrote. “I would rather that you finished your work to your own satisfaction than merely returning to gratify me.”

  Agnes was his favorite child, and he'd made a habit of telling her she was capable of achieving anything she set her mind to. Now she was doing the same for him. “May blessing be on her,” Livingstone answered in his journal. “And all the rest.”

  His search expedition was seven years old. The rainy season was just ending. He had fought the ants of February. He had vented his rage and secured his canoes in March. He had crossed Lake Bangweolo with Chuma and Susi and his small caravan. He had observed, on April 6, that the endless span of water south of Lake Bangweolo was not a seasonal flood, but the Nile itself “enacting its inundations, even at its source. The amount of water spread out over the country constantly excites my wonder—it is prodigious.”

  Unbeknownst to Livingstone, he would never discover the source of the Nile. He was, in fact, almost six hundred miles due south of the source. His death was now imminent. Not even a repeat of Stanley's exploits could save him. “I am pale, bloodless, and weak from bleeding profusely,” he wrote in early April. “An artery gives off a copious stream, and takes away my strength. Oh, how I long to be permitted by the Over Power to finish my work.”

  In addition to blood loss, anemia, malaria, dysentery, and hookworm, a blood clot the size of an apple had also formed in his abdomen. Livingstone didn't know it was there, but he could feel the pain—the slightest touch of a human hand on his lower back made him want to faint in agony. “It is not all pleasure, this exploration,” he journaled on April 19.

  Livingstone planned to complete his discoveries within six or seven months of being resupplied at Tabora. But by the time he reached the village of a chief named Chitambo on April 29, 1873, the six months was up.

  Like the lions of the animal kingdom, Livingstone had become a symbol of Africa. The male lion is a solitary presence, with meaty forearms designed for swatting, slashing, and tearing. They look docile and even affectionate as they sleep the hot days away. But they have lethal speed, a taste for flesh, and are always prepared to strike.
It was an obvious choice for Murchison to call his African explorers lions. The comparisons between the unassuming men with their great accomplishments and the king of beasts were apt.

  Livingstone thought too much was made of lions, however, and he lampooned their public mystique. “The same feeling which has induced the modern painter to caricature the lion, has led the sentimentalist to consider the lion's roar the most terrific of all earthly sounds. We hear ‘the majestic roar of the king of beasts.' It is, indeed, well calculated to inspire fear if you hear it in combination with the tremendously loud thunder of that country, on a night so pitchy dark that every flash of the intensely vivid lightning leaves you with the impression of stone blindness,” he wrote. “But when you are in a comfortable wagon or house the case is very different, and you hear the roar of the lion without any awe or alarm. The silly ostrich makes a noise as loud, yet he was never feared by man. To talk of the majestic roar of the lion is mere majestic twaddle.”

  Few men could make such a claim about lions, but Livingstone knew firsthand the terror of being in a lion's jaws. He had seen the animal up close, at its most vicious.

  “In general,” Livingstone once described the way a lion killed prey, “the lion seizes the animal he is attacking by the flank near the hind leg, or by the throat below the jaw. It is questionable whether he ever attempts to seize an animal by the withers. The flank is the most common point of attack, and that is the part he begins to feast on first. The natives and lions are very similar in their tastes in the selection of tit-bits: an eland may be seen disemboweled by a lion so completely that he scarcely seems cut up at all. The bowels and fatty parts form a full meal for even the largest lion.”

  He even took a cocky attitude in his journals. “One is more in danger of being run over when walking in the streets of London than he is of being devoured by lions in Africa, unless engaged in hunting the animal. Indeed, nothing I have seen or heard about lions would constitute a barrier in the way of men of ordinary courage of enterprise.

  “Hunting a lion with dogs involved very little danger as compared with hunting the Indian tiger, because the dogs bring him out of cover and make him stand at bay, giving the hunter plenty of time for a deliberate shot.”

  But lions taught him the most valuable lesson of his life. The lesson was learned in 1843, when Livingstone was still relatively new to Africa. A pack of lions had been killing a local village's cattle. The lions were tracked to a small wooded hill. The group surrounded the lion and beat through the undergrowth so the shooters could fire. Livingstone was in the act of reloading when he heard a warning shout. Spinning to the sound, he was attacked. “I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me,” Livingstone wrote. “He caught me by the shoulder as he sprang and we both came to the ground below together. Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does to a rat.”

  Later in London, when asked what thoughts were running through his head during such a traumatic moment, Livingstone answered with a bit of black humor. “I was thinking, with a feeling of disinterested curiosity, which part of me the brute would eat first.”

  When the lion, which had one paw on the back of Livingstone's head, was shot by another hunter, Livingstone walked away from the tragedy afraid of nothing. Death held no sway. When John Kirk was asked what impressed him most about Livingstone, he mentioned his fearlessness. “He did not know what fear was.”

  “His absolute lack of any sense of fear,” Kirk told an interviewer years after his travels with Livingstone, “amounted almost to a weakness. He would go into the most perilous positions without a tremor or a touch of hesitation. I never knew him to blench or show a sign of timorousness in any circumstance whatsoever.”

  Through the years, what gave Livingstone pause was not fear, but regret. “There are regrets,” he had written in 1862, “which will follow me to my dying day.”

  Lying in Chitambo's village, his primary regrets were family and indiscretion. His family ceased to exist as a unit when Livingstone sent them home in 1852 so he could attempt his walk across Africa. He cried as their ships sailed.

  Parenting in Victorian England was not a hands-on activity. Children were expected to look after themselves and their younger siblings. When they were old enough, children were either sent away to boarding school or sent to find a job. It was normal for fathers to work long hours and have limited contact with the children. Mothers spent an hour or two with the children each day, at most. So when Livingstone traveled for years at a time, there was never a question about him being a poor parent. Only cruel, abusive, or drunkard men received such a label. Nevertheless, “the act of orphanizing my children, which now becomes painfully clear, will be like tearing out my bowels, for they will all forget me,” Livingstone wrote before his trans-Africa trek.

  That his children had learned to do without him was pain enough. But Livingstone's infidelity was a breach of character. And there was one manifestation of this that remained fairly well concealed during Livingstone's lifetime. It may have occurred in the fiery princess Manenko's village or in some other village during his many years in Africa, but Livingstone, it was later documented, fathered at least one African child. That son was the teenaged boy who had joined the caravan sometime after Tabora. “He also had with him his son. He was a half-caste. The people said it was Bwana's son,” Chitambo later swore in a deposition, speaking of the day Livingstone entered his village. “Bwana” was a term of respect. “He was respected by the others as the son of a chief. I did not see the mother or any other woman with the Bwana's people.”

  Chitambo wasn't the only villager who would swear to a subsequent generation of British travelers about Livingstone's son. Another African, named Mumana, remembered that “the Bwana had one son with him . . . his skin was quite white like a European child and his hair was fair.”

  So as Livingstone lay in Chitambo's village, the boy was there, too, having joined Livingstone sometime between Stanley's departure from Tabora and Livingstone's arrival in the region surrounding Chitambo's village. Livingstone never wrote about the child. But the boy was sick and had been carried, like his father, and the locals would always remember the odd sight of the ill white father and his ill white son. They would speak of the respect accorded Livingstone's son, and how Chuma and Susi had built a house of grass and sticks not only for Livingstone, but for the boy as well.

  The night of May 1, 1873, would also be remembered vividly. In Chitambo's village, Chuma and Susi had made a small bed for Livingstone and arranged his mosquito netting, then left him alone for the night. Laying in the dark, his coming death was like an angel on his chest.

  Livingstone woke between midnight and dawn. He slipped to the floor and got on his knees to pray. Chuma and Susi had gone to bed, as he'd instructed them.

  It was 4 A.M. when they found him. He still knelt in prayer, but was pitched forward, with his face buried in the pillow as if he'd dozed while talking to God. David Livingstone, at the age of sixty, was dead.

  • CHAPTER 40 •

  Pall Mall

  May 1874

  Chitambo's Village

  Chuma and Susi could have simply buried Livingstone's body near Chitambo's village and left for the coast. It was the logical thing to do. But they knew he had longed to return to England before he died. Finishing the journey without him would have been inappropriate, so, embarking on one final exhausting journey with Livingstone, Chuma and Susi set out on a mission to carry his body back to England.

  To preserve the explorer's remains, a tribesman named Farijala, who had once been a surgeon's servant in Zanzibar, made a single horizontal incision in Livingstone's abdomen, just above the pubic bone. The examining coroner in London would one day call Farijala's work “ingeniously contrived,” marveling how the uneducated tribesman was able to remove Livingstone's heart, lungs, and abdominal organs through the small opening. As he did so, Farijala also removed the massive blood clot in Livingstone's intestine. Then, cradling the h
eart carefully, Farijala laid it in the precious tin box Livingstone once used to protect his journals. After handing the watertight box to Chuma and Susi, he shoved salt into Livingstone's empty chest cavity. Then, even as the remainder of Livingstone's body dried for two weeks in the sun, a hole was scraped from the ground at the base of a sprawling mpundu tree. The tin box was placed inside as prayers were read over the grave site. The dirt was placed back on top. His body would be returning to England, but Livingstone's heart would always remain in Africa.

  The mummification of Livingstone's body continued. As it was dried, the legs were bent back at the knees to make him shorter and easier to carry. Blue and white striped calico was wrapped tightly around his corpse, followed by a protective cylinder of bark. Finally, the entire package was wrapped tightly in sailcloth, then slung from a pole. Two weeks after his death, Livingstone's body swaying between them, Chuma and Susi began the long march to Zanzibar with the rest of the caravan. A drummer boy marched at the front of the column. Livingstone's consular Union Jack snapped in the breeze. In all, seventy-nine porters made up the caravan. Many of them carried nothing more than Livingstone's books and papers.

  Moving slowly, stopping frequently for weather and sickness, taking turns carrying Livingstone's body, the caravan reached Tabora in early November. The Royal Geographical Society, consumed by the sudden need to bring Livingstone back out of Africa, had sent yet another relief expedition to find him. This third Livingstone relief expedition had seen one disaster after another. The usual litany of weather and malaria and geography had made their passage from Bagamoyo to Tabora miserable. Robert Moffatt, Livingstone's nephew, had been one of the expedition's four white men. He died of malaria. Another expedition member would commit suicide after a bout of dysentery drove him mad.